Keeping Moist Food Fresh With the SureFeed Sealed Pet Bowl

If you have a slow-eating cat like Pierre, you may leave food down for him all the time just to be sure that there’s food waiting when he decides to eat a few more bites. Unfortunately, most people who leave food out for hours on end opt to use dry food because they think it doesn’t go bad as fast. The problem is that dry food isn’t good for your cat.

When our friends at SureFlap offered to let us test their sealed pet bowl that closes over the contents of the bowl to keep it fresh, we thought this could be the answer to the dilemma of keeping food fresh for slow eaters, so we had to check it out.

Why is Moist Food Important?

First, let’s talk moisture. Your cat needs it to keep from getting dehydrated, and the older your cat is, the more likely your cat needs even more of it.

Here’s part of the contents label from a bag of dry food. Check out the moisture content:

Now here’s the moisture content of a can of cat food I had on the shelf of Pierre’s canned food. That’s a lot more moisture!

A cat eating dry food has to drink a lot of water to offset the lack of moisture content in his food, and a lot of them don’t keep up with the necessary water intake. Cats eating canned food are getting it as part of their dinner!

So… why do so many people feed kibble? In a lot of cases, it comes down to convenience, and I get that, believe me! When I first tried feeding canned food to my cats, it sat around a long time, and it ended up looking like this.

Did you say yuck when you saw the brownish dried-out parts? Me too! Cats aren’t big fans of it, either. If your cat is a slow eater and prefers to eat a little now and a little later (I’m looking at you, Pierre), this can be a real problem, and it’s part of the reason that a lot of people abandon the idea of feeding canned food and go back to dehydrating kibble.

Keeping Moist Food Fresh with the SureFeed Sealed Pet Bowl

What if you had a butler who would stand next to your cat’s bowl and put some cling wrap over it when your cat walked away and then took it back off so that the food was nice and moist when your cat was hungry for another bite or two in a little while?

I’m totally not going to tell you about that, because I have never had a butler, and if I ever do, I have some other tasks for him first. But even better than a butler is a bowl that will do the same thing for you 24 hours a day. That’s what I found with the SureFeed sealed pet bowl when Pierre tried it out. It comes with a bowl that has a silicone lip around the top and then a battery-powered bowl with motion sensors on three sides.

It’s pretty neat because it opens up when it sees your cat approach, and it closes tight again. Just watch. (If the video below doesn’t display for you, view directly on YouTube)

As you can see, this bowl doesn’t limit access to only one cat, so you would want to use it in a situation where all of your cats are eating the same diet. (SureFeed does make a bowl that limits access to a single cat. More about that here.)

The bowl has a training mode where the door only has limited motion so that you can gradually get your cat accustomed to something on their bowl moving like that. Since Pierre has been eating from a SureFeed microchip bowl for about eight months, we didn’t have to go through the introduction process for this bowl, but he learned in less than a week with his previous bowl using the same gradual process.

I did notice that this bowl is very quiet. When Pierre finishes eating and steps away from his usual bowl, I’m accustomed to hearing it from all the way at my desk in the next room, but the SureFeed sealed pet bowl is so quiet I couldn’t hear it from a room away.

SureFeed Sealed Pet Bowl Really Does Keep Moist Food Fresher

I was kind of skeptical about how well the SureFeed sealed pet bowl worked to keep food fresh. I mean, how sealed could that hinged top really be? So I put half a can of cat food on a saucer and the other half in the SureFeed bowl, then I left it in my spare bathroom.

You may remember we wrote before about Newton and Pierre objecting to a closed door in the house, and some of you wondered what was behind the door. Those photos were of frustrated kitties who could smell the food in the open saucer for nine hours while it was sitting in the bathroom for this test. Cats have an amazing sense of smell, so maybe the two of them could smell the food inside the sealed SureFeed bowl, too, but I can’t smell it when the bowl is closed. That led keeps in smells and keeps flying insects out when it is shut since it sits snugly over the bowl against the silicone lip of the bowl.

So how did the SureFeed bowl do for keeping the food fresh? You can see that the food left on the plate for hours had dark, crusty parts from exposure to the air, while the food that spent that time closed in the SureFeed sealed feeder still looked moist and fresh.

I was surprised at how fresh the food looked, since I expected it to look a little worse for wear, but the bowl sealed it up really well.

Fresher food has to be healthier for slow-eating cats, so that’s a paws-up win for everyone.

FTC Disclosure: We were compensated to review the SureFeed sealed pet bowl. The opinions in this review are our own and not influenced by any outsider. We receive no additional benefits for talking about the product or company.

That is *such* a good idea!!! Mudpie is a really slow eater, and not a huge fan of wet food anyways, so I’m always trying to find ways to keep her leftovers from crusting over while still leaving them accessible to her.

And now we’ve solved the mystery of what was behind that closed door 🙂

I typically give my cats mostly dry food because neither of them eats wet food fast enough. It sits in the bowl and gets all crusty and dry. Having a bowl like this would give me the option of feeding them more wet food.

Elliott says he’d love one of those since he is a slow eater, but with the two little vacuums here it would never work. Mom has to stand guard to make sure those two don’t run El and Caroline from their dinners (even though they are allowed to eat on the counter for just that reason).

You know, we currently have ants coming out of an impossibly tiny hole in our bathroom tile grout. So it’s hard to expect anything to be ant-proof. It definitely cuts out odors, which are an ant attractant, and it would slow down ants. I am not sure whether it would stop then entirely or not.

I LIKE my food with a srust on it. I don’t understand why TW takes it away when it’s so yummy. Sometimes she does cover it with plastic wrap when I refuse to sniff my gut rot for lunch while telling me that it’s gonna be my dinner. I’m glad you mentioned that it’s quiet cos I don’t like things that make noise.

Never heard of this before but it’s a great idea. I feed my cat both wet and dry and while he loves both types, he’ll only eat the wet food right when he’s fed and will never go back to it as it doesn’t stay fresh.

This is very interesting. I am wondering how long wet cat food can be at room temperature and not spoil?

I feed a very slow eater who gets only gets wet food so I put down small amounts about 6 or more times a day. It works for me because I am at home but I have wondered how he will do when we have to have a sitter feeding him if we have to be away.

So, how long to you think wet food might be safe from spoiling in one of these? I will check with the makers of his brand of food and see if they can give me an idea.
Thanks for featuring this. I’d love to try one.
Lily

I checked a couple of places online and it seems that some wet cat food can be left at room temperature, depending somewhat on how warm the room is, for around 4 hours. I think different ones might vary and will still check the makers of our brand.
Thanks again,
Lily

Holy kibble! My problem with wet food (besides that Bear has to free feed otherwise he scarfs food down) is the protein content. Even a superior wet food isn’t going to reach 20% protein. Bear’s kibble has 42%. You are spot on about moisture – ESPECIALLY for neutered males. Bear actually drinks quite a bit (he always has – I hawk over that to watch out for symptoms of diabetes) – so I’m lucky on that count. I do give him a treat of 1/4 of a 5.5oz can of wet food every day too. I like this product – beyond the protein issue, the biggest reason I haven’t switched is the issue of keeping it fresh. I’d be interested to try it!

This would be a dream in our house for 2 kitties with special needs who are on a wet food only diet and are grazers when it comes to eating. Thank you thank you for featuring this product, as we had no idea a perfect solution for a long time problem for us existed! We can always count on our wonderful kitty blogs to let us know important and helpful things to benefit our fur babies lives for the better.

This is really nice. To keep Husani’s food fresh and ant free. This is a great feeder, I am very picky so I know I wouldn’t dare eat anything that looked dehydrated and nasty. All good Cat Parents should get one.

I have never seen this before, this looks AWESOME! I especially have a hard time keeping my cat’s wet food fresh considering he saves it for later all of the time. This is such a great idea, i’m going to have to look more into it!

I make my cat’s food and it is definitely moist – the morning’s are no problem, he guzzles that stuff down and licks the bowl clean but in the evening he prefers to eat little bits at a time over a few hours.
This would be a great help to keep the food from drying out (because once it gets too dry, my cat wants no part of it) 😀
thanks!

This is a miracle product! Chloe loves the wet food that has some gravy in it and it gets so gross if she doesn’t eat it all right away. Then she comes back crying for fresh food later because she wants the normal gravy again – I waste so much.

This would be awesome to win for my Bootsie she has chronic kidney disease and has to take meds 3 times a day along with needing wet food and this would be nice to help me keep from throwing so much of the wet food away and which helps big time since her meds can get expensive.

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